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Episode 367: Reid Mitenbuler
1k Plays2 years ago
Reid Mitenbuler (@reidmitenbuler) is the author of Wanderlust: An Eccentric Explorer, an Epic Journey, a Lost Age (Mariner Books).
Substack: rageagainstthealgorithm.substack.com
Social: @CNFPod
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction & Shoutout to Athletic Brewing
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, here's my requisite shout out to Athletic Brewing, my favorite non-alcoholic beer. Not a paid plug, but I am a brand ambassador, and I want to celebrate this amazing product. Go to athleticbrewing.com. If you use the promo code BRENDAN to 020 at checkout, get a nice little discount on your first order. I don't get any money, as they are not an official sponsor of the show. I just get points towards swag and beer. Give it a shot. The free wave is my favorite. Go get some.
The Art of Research: Writing as Sculpting
00:00:28
Speaker
Yeah, and I have that tendency to want to exhaust the research just because I know I'm going to leave 90% of it on the cutting room floor. That's like that old saying about writing. It's like, well, how do you write a novel? It's like, well, it's like doing a sculpture of an elephant. You take a block of stone, you just chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. That's kind of like what writing would look like this is.
00:00:57
Speaker
Oh hey CNFers, it's CNFPOD, Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, good for me. You take a good adventure tale, Reed Mittenbuehler has a story to tell, man. It's Wanderlust, an eccentric explorer, an epic journey, a lost age.
Introducing 'Wanderlust' and Peter Freuchen's Story
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Speaker
It's published by Mariner Books.
00:01:20
Speaker
It's about Peter Freuchen. He's at the center of Reed's story, a story that turns more into a biography of the 20th century carried on the back of the mule known as Peter Freuchen. It's a juicy book of a Dutch explorer who spent roughly 20 years among the Inuit in Greenland, weathering deadly expeditions and illustrating the brutality of living near the Arctic.
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Speaker
but his life also spans the golden age of Hollywood.
Exploring Reed Mittenbuehler's Writing Journey
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Speaker
Tangling with the Nazis, the $64,000 man or whatever that game show was, I mean that's in here. Bonkers. Anyway, Reed also is the author of Bourbon Empire, the Past and Future of America's Whiskey and Wild Minds, the artists and rivalries that inspired the golden age of animation.
00:02:19
Speaker
His writing has appeared in Air Mail, The Atlantic, Slate, and Whiskey Advocate. You can find them at Twitter, at Twitter, on Twitter, at ReadMittenBueller, or on Instagram with the more badass handle, MittenBueller. You can learn more about him and his work at ReadMittenBueller.com. Bueller. Bueller.
00:02:44
Speaker
Make sure you head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. It's now on Substack. Just click the lightning bolt on my website or visit RageAgainstTheAlgorithm.Substack.com. So first of the month, no spam, can't beat it. This is how we Rage Against the Algorithm.
00:03:02
Speaker
If you dig the show, consider sharing it with your networks so we can grow the pie and get the CNFing thing into the brains of other CNFers who need the juice.
The Genesis of 'Wanderlust': Discovering Freuchen
00:03:11
Speaker
You can also leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts, so the wayward CNFer might say, shit, I'll give that a shot.
00:03:17
Speaker
Also, you could go to patreon.com slash cnfpod and maybe think about dropping in a few bucks into the hat if you glean some value from what we churn and burn here at CNF Pod HQ. Show is free, but as sure as hell ain't cheap.
00:03:34
Speaker
So in this conversation, we talk about how Reed stumbled across Froekin, how Reed hates writing, but he kind of loves it too, and how he organizes the research by character, chronology, and theme. Oh, how can we forget the almighty notecard hashtag John McPhee? Let's get after it, CNFers. Here's Reed Mittenbuhler.
00:04:07
Speaker
I'm always drawn to those kind of people. Yeah, what drew you to Freakin? You know, the way I discovered Freakin, it's an interesting story.
Themes in Freuchen's Life: Exploration & Colonialism
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Speaker
I have a friend, he had recently become a member of the Explorers Club, and it's on New York's Upper East Side. And it's this old mansion. And when you go in, it's like this throwback to a distant age, right? You've got
00:04:30
Speaker
Persian rugs, you've got all these artifacts from actual old maps on the walls, stuffed leather chairs, big fireplaces. It's like, you've got to see this place. We'll catch up over a couple of whiskeys. We go after hours of, kind of feels like we're doing something illicit, like we've broken in. We go to a place called the trophy room, which is on the very top floor. And it's full of, yeah, there's a height of a Siberian tiger rumored to have eaten 48 men stuffed down for a pen with tusks. I think Teddy Roosevelt, who was a member might've donated.
00:05:00
Speaker
I was sitting there catching up. So it takes a while for me to notice this painting over the fireplace of Freiken. I didn't know it at the time. He's got this crazy beard. He's got like a pirate's peg leg. He's wearing a suit. It's kind of a goofy painting. And I think, you know, we're joking because we're drinking. We're like, what have you done? You must have done something to get your portrait in a place like this. I go up to the painting, has his name underneath it on a plaque. So I look him up.
00:05:27
Speaker
And this story, this awesome story explodes. It's as if Mark Twain wrote this guy's life. He has written thousands of pages of published and unpublished memoirs and all this stuff. And as I'm learning more and more about him, what really draws me to this story is him. He's just a really interesting person. He's kind of a heterodox thinker. He's all over the place. You can't really put him in any specific column. He's got all these adventures. And there's a real where's Waldo aspect to his adventures.
00:05:55
Speaker
Here he is in the Arctic. Here he is in the White House with Herbert Hoover. Here he is with Gene Harlow in Golden Age. Here he is fighting the Nazis. Here he is winning a game show. He's like, you know, the Dose-Eckes Beer commercials and the most interesting. He's that guy in real life. But what really draws me to him and my goal with the book wasn't really biography so much, although, you know, it says biography and people described it as a biography. But I really just wanted to use Freiken as a lens because I realized that the entire 20th century
00:06:25
Speaker
really collapses down to the scale of his life. And you can use him as a lens for exploring that time period, all the political, economic, and cultural forces that shaped it, be it media and Golden Age Hollywood exploring and nationalism, colonialism, all these different things.
Cultural Impacts on Greenland's Inuit People
00:06:42
Speaker
He somehow touches on those topics and you can learn about them in a very interesting, new, unique way through him.
00:06:49
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And so I was like, you know, I'm really writing about the 20th century. I'm really writing about this big thing that collapsed down to this smaller thing. And that's what, you know, I just think that helps give books resonance and a coherency that's nice to have when you're reading. So that's what really drew me to him is how he as a small figure in history symbolized so much that was a lot larger than him.
00:07:13
Speaker
At what point in your research did that degree of 20th century world building reveal itself to you and became more than just froikin, it was like you said, he was like a vector to talk about the 20th century.
00:07:30
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It was right at the beginning. So Freiken, who was born in 1886, he lived at the very tail end of what, there's different names for it, but a lot of people call it the heroic age of exploration. This time period, which, you know, for centuries before people would look at maps and there's whole huge sections of the maps and people in the Western world had no idea what was there, you know, and they'd fill in these sections of the maps with pictures of dragons or sea monsters or, you know, whatever big blank spaces. And.
00:07:59
Speaker
you know, people were increasingly going there and learning and spreading this knowledge about what was there. And when Freakin's born, that age is kind of ending in a lot of ways. I mean, people really are getting to all the great corners of the world, mapping it out, figuring out what's going on. And so you've got this group of explorers who in a lot of ways were fighting for the last straps of glory.
00:08:22
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It's like, who's gonna be the first person to reach the North Pole? Who's gonna be the first person to reach the South Pole? Who's gonna be the first person to reach this really tall mountain peak? Whatever.
00:08:30
Speaker
And, you know, the stakes are still just as big. People are dying on these expeditions, but the payoffs, the glory is getting smaller and smaller because the big stuff is being accomplished. In that bubble, in that moment, you see a lot of colonialism and you see a lot of nationalism that is going to end up shaping the rest of the century as nations, which are sponsoring these expeditions in a lot of cases, not all.
00:08:54
Speaker
A lot of them were sponsored by scientific groups are funding these things in order to get glory, in order to claim the last bits of land. And you'll see these other concentrations later in the century, such as World War II or World War I, coming out of a lot of those impulses. You will also see things like climate change. You know, Freakin was talking about climate change, not calling it that specifically, but talking about changes to the climate and so forth as early as the 1930s. And that's an outgrowth of
00:09:24
Speaker
industrialization, which is also fueling this drive to explore and fueling what people are doing to the planet. So very early on in history, you start seeing kind of these little Easter eggs of stuff that is very much still affecting us today, or in the case of climate change, really starting to come home to roots where people are really realizing it. And before you can realize it in the thirties and the fifties, you start, you was talking about how it was affecting people's lives.
00:09:51
Speaker
But the reaction to him, the response was often very muted. It was like, oh, yeah, that's interesting. Whatever. Moving on, let's talk about something else. But he was a little bit like the canary in the coal mine. And we just didn't take that message in a way we probably should have. And now we're starting to really see the ramifications of it. So a lot
Crafting a Narrative: Research & Organization
00:10:11
Speaker
of it started to come together for me very early on with his very earliest expeditions to Greenland.
00:10:17
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Yeah, and speaking of those Easter eggs, be it climate change or even later in the book where the Thule area of Greenland, they were starting to take on more material comforts and you really get a sense of how materialism and consumerism does not necessarily lead to, it might lead to some better
00:10:40
Speaker
quality of life in some ways but in a lot of ways it totally depletes sort of the inherent happiness of a certain group of people and that's just something that we're totally seeing today in this sort of capitalistic world that we live in that we try to just that the hedonistic treadmill of more more more and doesn't necessarily lead to more happiness and I kind of got that pulse you know through that towards the end of the book as well
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah. And what really attracted me to that idea was that, but it's also very complicated, right? In that you have areas of life that are improving, you know, almost nobody would contest that they're improving and then other things that really aren't improving. And so it's always this very delicate balancing act. One of the interesting things about Freiken and the way he wrote about these issues is that he wasn't particularly sentimental. Like he would talk about the downsides of colonialism,
00:11:35
Speaker
but then he would also talk about positive things that had happened from this cultural exchange between these two different groups or many different groups in a way that today could maybe get him in trouble, but it's refreshing in a way from him because he's just very objective and very realistic and he's talking about change and gets to something that today I think we would be, I think we would be better off by acknowledging more as acknowledging progress, but then acknowledging when certain areas of progress
00:12:03
Speaker
have side effects that aren't as good. It's not black or white. It's not all or none. It's like these things are all exchanges. And in the book, we talk a little about what economists sometimes call the progress paradox, where you'll improve a life in a certain way, or you'll improve standards of living in a certain way. But there's some drawback. There's some negative. And we have to acknowledge that negative.
00:12:27
Speaker
and try to account for it as well. And sometimes people want to ignore that, you know, oh, it's progress. We're just marching on. And it's like, no, we have lost something. And there's that message, you know, in the novels of Marilynne Robinson, you know, the Gilead novels, there's this wonderful idea that the past, which is so often seen as the source of our discontents, also contain remedies to those things, too. Like there are good things from the past that we've lost that it would be worthwhile to maybe restore.
00:12:54
Speaker
while acknowledging that we've improved in certain ways. And so it gets complicated. I like that nuance. I like that complexity. I saw that in Freiken's story and something I really tried to make sure, you know, kept above water in the book.
00:13:08
Speaker
Yeah, and to that point of progress as well, there are often times in Greenland where there would be, depending on the winter, there might be these prolonged periods of famine, and families or mothers might have to make the decision to actually kill their children or kill babies. And then you figure, decades later, because of that cross-pollination of the more
00:13:37
Speaker
industrialized countries with the indigenous peoples of Greenland, famines weren't to that extreme where they didn't have to commit infanticide just to survive. So it's like there's an instance of like, okay, there is a net gain in that sense. Yeah, clear upside. And that's something, during my research, I reached out to the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which is kind of a pan-Inuit group.
00:14:05
Speaker
Talk to a number of people from, you know, communities about these issues. And it's, you know, I was fascinated to get there. I sent an early copy of the manuscript to some just like, Hey, I'm presenting these issues that affected your community and whatnot. And to get that sort of feedback from one woman told me, she goes, it's really good that you emphasize just how rough life was back in those years when a lot of, you know, especially in far North Greenland were extremely isolated. The life expectancy was something like 28, about 28, according to some estimates.
00:14:35
Speaker
because of famines and a number of other things. And one woman really stressed to me, she goes, it can sometimes be a little condescending to hear outsiders, Westerners talk about us like museum pieces, like, oh, we shouldn't have, using more terms like corrupted them or, and she goes, why can't we adapt and come into the modern world just like any other group, but still remain in it? Like people look at this as
00:15:01
Speaker
it's inherently some kind of ancient culture. And she was like, it's not. I mean, we're people too. We want a lot of these things. We want these comforts, but there's an idea sometimes that we should be denied that. Like we shouldn't have been touched. Like we shouldn't have, there should have been no interaction and that interaction couldn't have been an exchange, right? We take some things from your culture that we'd like, and then our aspects of ours that are worth knowing about as well. And that was Freiken's attitude. You know, Freiken didn't go there to conquer or to force
00:15:32
Speaker
European culture, it was really an exchange. It was to learn. And there were things he loved about culture. And he was adopted by it. So he was very much part of it. And he lived there for almost 20 years. But there are also things he liked about Europe. I mean, it wasn't all or none for him. He was kind of piecemeal. And he understood that that flows two ways.
00:15:52
Speaker
What did you know about Freuchen kind of going into your research and then like what surprised you and revealed itself to you over time as like these more sort of tentpole events through which you could start to build the skeleton of a narrative? You know, one of the things that that that really grabbed me by the throat the most was but just how much his era
00:16:17
Speaker
echoes with our own. You know, people like to say, and it's to the point where it's almost a cliche by this point, history repeats itself, et cetera, et cetera, but through him, you really do see it. I mean, even in the way that people use language and you realize that people from the past weren't that much different than us.
Challenges in Historical Nonfiction
00:16:35
Speaker
You know, they weren't morally superior, they weren't morally inferior. You know, you really see those echoes and how it really is a cycle.
00:16:44
Speaker
And then you worry, because especially in the lead up to World War II, and then after World War II, you see all these lessons that humanity learned in this great fire of conflict that was the war. And then built in a lot of ways, a better world, you know, the UN and understanding how nations should deal with each other and how we should interact and cooperate. And you had a period in human history of relative great peace.
00:17:14
Speaker
And now you see that all the people who have learned those lessons and learned the lessons from that conflict are pretty much dead and have died off. And then a lot of the people who have learned those great lessons at their knees have also kind of faded out of the picture. And you start seeing a lot of the same forces leading into World War II in resurgence. You're seeing authoritarianism, more nationalism,
00:17:41
Speaker
And it's just like, you have to ask yourself, are these things that are hardwired into humans? Like we learned the lessons, but now we're forgetting. It's like a child who has to learn by burning their hand on the stove. That generation that burned its hand on the stove and then corrected for the problems, they're now gone. And the new generation is young and really didn't feel it in their bones. And it's like, does it just need to happen again? They need to burn their hand on the stove. And is that the cycle of history where?
00:18:07
Speaker
It's really not every generation, but it's every three or four generations once a really much older group fades away. That's something that I was thinking about, not to be too gloomy on the show, but yeah, I found myself thinking about a lot while looking at how his time really mirrors our own in just some pretty amazing ways. And when you're doing biography, sometimes it can be
00:18:36
Speaker
Not my topics the wrong word but like you're taking you're looking at like one particular figure and sometimes the tendency is to be like okay and you just focus on them hardcore 100% but then there's an important part of world building involved and you've already alluded to that a bit.
00:18:56
Speaker
And how, in a sense, it's more of a biography of a world and he's something of a vector. But over the course of writing this book and even reading biographies on your own for your own pleasure and your own research, how important is world building to building the story around a particular subject?
00:19:20
Speaker
I think it's huge because you want to create a space, a world that readers, your audience can escape into just for the mechanics of reading. And I'm always thinking about the pleasures of reading. And I try to be, it's almost like customer service to your reader, right? Like I'm doing this for you to give you a place. And people, it's interesting to think about novels that way and novels do a very good job of that. And so narrative nonfiction, you know, part of the duty to entertain or whatever.
00:19:50
Speaker
I try to keep that forefront in mind. It's like, bring them into that world with a lot of biographies. And I love reading biographies, but sometimes you can see certain conventions and a lot of them where.
00:20:01
Speaker
a writer will very dutifully, because it's about someone's life, so they want to get a lot of details and facts down for posterity. So we've all seen it when we cracked open a biography, and the first chapter has to do with the main characters' great-grandparents migrating somewhere, something like that. And it's just a lot of prologue. You're not driving people in the action. And you can lose, I think, a lot of readers very fast. So I thought of Freiken. It was less about the biography aspect.
00:20:29
Speaker
and more about he's a character. He's a character in a world and the lesser important details, like certain things about his childhood really should only be brought up when they service the core of him as a person. There was one review of the book that complimented me on that. I was happy to see it where they're like, yeah, you know, he just skips over most of the childhood, you know, comma, which was probably a good thing and just jumps right into it. And then I was like, later on in the book, I did back up and go back to his childhood to kind of
00:20:58
Speaker
fill you in so that you could learn a little more about where he's coming from and about his family and things that are important also to create that world, but not dwelling on them. It can sometimes be disappointing. I think with biographies, when biographers treat it a little bit like a police report, you know, just the facts, ma'am, just the facts, you know, it can be just names and dates kind of history. You really want to create an experience for the readers because that's ultimately what's going to lodge the story and the lessons and everything that goes along with it in their brain.
00:21:26
Speaker
is if they can get lost in it just a little bit. So I try not to be too sterile. Now along the journey of researching and writing a book and even predating that there are always books that can be referred to as mentor texts. Were there any particular books in this genre that were kind of a North Star for you as you were setting upon this particular journey?
00:21:53
Speaker
Yeah, a couple things. So there was a sentiment that I was kind of a North Star for me on this journey. But as far as books in particular, you know, you've got the whole range of writers that are influences and you're, you know, for me, I take little bits and pieces from each of them. You know, on your podcast before it's kind of funny, I hear a lot of writers mention John McPhee.
00:22:14
Speaker
Yeah, and you, which is kind of one of those people, the only people who really ever talk about them are writers, it seems like, but everyone just adores them. I look at the narrative nonfiction, you know, a lot of New Yorker writers, Susan Orlean and Jill Lepore, because they are both wonderful writers, but also funny, like humorous. And there was something that was actually very humorous about Freakin' Story, so I wanted to capture that. So I would
00:22:44
Speaker
A lot of times pull down Jill Lepore's The Secret History of Wonder Woman, which is about the man who created Wonder Woman, the Wonder Woman comics, just to kind of remind myself of humor and getting that into the story. Rich Cohen is another writer that I really admire because he really writes like a novel. Like when you're brought into his story, especially The Fish That Ate the Whale about Samuel Zemore.
00:23:12
Speaker
a very descriptive book that I've read several times and it's just a joy to read. I like a lot of his writing. And then you've got your biggies like Alfred Lansing and Walter Lord, these kind of great figures in narrative nonfiction. Alfred Lansing did the endurance book about Ernest Shackleton and Walter Lord books like A Night to Remember about the sinking of the Titanic.
00:23:36
Speaker
Those are good examples just to remind me how to move through action and create scenes, which I think helps readers absorb the writing a little bit better. And then you've got your figures like.
00:23:50
Speaker
For me, I had an early personal experience with the writer Tom Wolfe when I was in high school. A teacher in high school took me aside and a friend was like, you know, this guy is going to be speaking tomorrow night about architecture. Tom Wolfe from Bauhaus, our house. And you guys should just go. It was a nice moment when a high school teacher encouraged a couple of students. And I remember going, that was the first time I realized like, oh,
00:24:13
Speaker
Like I read his book after that and I really enjoyed his talk and he was very gracious during the talk and afterwards. So, and you know, David Halberstam was another writer when I was in college, came to speak and had a big effect on things that later devoured his books. So those are some of the influences for me.
00:24:29
Speaker
What becomes the challenge to create those really animating scenes in nonfiction, and specifically things from a century ago or more, and trying to build those scenes so they do feel cinematic and alive, even though they happened hundreds of years ago? Yes, and I was really lucky with this book, because Freiken, as I said before, he had thousands of pages of published and unpublished memoirs,
00:24:58
Speaker
The other thing is that on expeditions, old explorers, a lot of them were kind of like celebrities
The Writing Process: Organizing with Note Cards
00:25:06
Speaker
in a way. And they needed to be celebrities in order to get funding for the next expedition. So they all had book deals and would publish and would lecture. After their expeditions, they would go on these circuits and talk. They would get hired to write accounts of all their adventures. So there was a wealth.
00:25:24
Speaker
of material out there where they were painstakingly recreating all these details. And I would gather all of these reports and all of these things together so that I had a lot of details to work with. So I could insert things into this text like you would normally see in a novel, like about what the smoke looked like on a cooking fire or what the air smelled like or, you know,
00:25:46
Speaker
the crust on the fur of their clothing after they got off the ice cap after many, many months out in the middle of nowhere. I had those kinds of details that I was lucky enough to insert into this text with certainty that it really happened so that it could check the box of being accurate. It needs to be that for nonfiction, but feel a little more novelistic. I was lucky to just have a treasure trove of material.
00:26:17
Speaker
And this is a big beefy book and it's always a challenge to keep your head around all your research so you can best access things for yourself but also for fact checkers and such as you're trying to structure your narrative. So how did you go about organizing your research and going about your research so you could sit down and try to execute it?
00:26:46
Speaker
So, and I, I've had some writer friends make fun of me for this cause I'm very old school. I use note cards and for this book and my other books, I'll have thousands of note cards and as far as, and I, and I organize them that, you know, I've got the source of whatever the thing is, and then I'll write in a theme and then I'll write in a character.
00:27:09
Speaker
And I'll write in chronology on it. And that way I can move these things around. And as I'm organizing the book, I'm often thinking about it like architecture. Everyone's got a different approach and some work better for some people than others. I know some writers who just, just begin and they throw it all out there and then they do the winnowing down later. I like to do a lot of outlining because I, you know, there's a precision that just works well for me.
00:27:32
Speaker
I think of architecture, and I think of every little point in the book like a brick. Where does this brick go? And this one could go here. You're Tetris-ing it just a little bit. And the three guiding principles I use, I have character, characters, and then I have chronology. So as I'm organizing, I kind of know. And you can break the chronology a little bit. You can call it back. You can have a flashback, call it that, or sometimes even a flash forward. I'll have a little more careful about those. And then theme.
00:28:01
Speaker
And this book has a number of themes like wanderlust, you've got the climate change stuff, you've got political themes. And so there are some places where do I group this? Well, this should go here because of the chronology, but I should shift it a little bit over here because I want to put it with this theme and we'll take a little moment here to explore this theme.
00:28:23
Speaker
And those are the three things that are kind of helping me figure out where to put all these different blocks. So that's how I think from an organizational perspective. I have a writer friend here in LA. He's a screenwriter. We're talking about this the other night. I was asking him, how much do you outline? He had just finished writing a pilot for a project. He had a 20-page outline for a 60-page pilot we were laughing about. It's like a third of the book.
00:28:51
Speaker
And he made a comment that really lodged with me and he goes, you know, I think a lot of writers, they use writing to work out their own issues, you know, cause they're almost using this therapy, especially in novels and then, and then, you know, fiction writing. And he goes, I know more too. He goes, they're really just using it. It's their therapy. It's like a thing that they're using to get stuff out of their head and just work with their own head. And he's like, I think of it more as like, I have a duty to almost a customer. Like I need to enter, entertain.
00:29:19
Speaker
And he goes, I really, that just to me wastes so much time. And it's not a waste for them because they're using it for kind of this other purpose, but I'm trying to construct a story that will entertain, educate, whatever people. So he goes, I really don't want to be sitting there and going back and redoing things because I figured out a better way. I want to sit there early on and just organize.
00:29:39
Speaker
And you'd think that someone with that mindset might be writing superhero movies or something like that, but he's actually writing psychological, very character-driven stories dealing with interesting sorts of themes. So that really stuck in my head when he said that, because I realized I'm a little bit the same way, where I love writing, and it is a way sometimes to... I also hate writing. But it's a way to...
00:30:08
Speaker
For me, I love exploring the topics and going down all these little rabbit holes. And with a book like this, there's a million rabbit holes. I mean, just here we are in Golden Age Hollywood. Here we are in the Danish resistance. Here we are with Sir Hubert Wilkins as he invents this basically religion that has an influence on L. Ron Hubbard, Jimi Hendrix, and Jerry Garcia. You know, just rabbit holes, right? So I love that process of it, but I also really want to
00:30:36
Speaker
have readers enjoy the book. I've had some writer friends say to me things like, Oh, you know, I'm just doing it really for myself. Uh, I don't really care if anyone reads it and I just don't get that. I'm like, I want people to read it. I want them to enjoy it. I want, and I want them to not think about how I'm putting the story together or as a carpenter. I don't want you to think about how the grooves are aligned or anything. They just want you to enjoy the chair.
00:31:01
Speaker
So that time I was thinking about it. Well, yeah. And books are expensive. You know, it's like, you know, this year books, forty five dollars for hardcover. And it's like, all right, that's not that's not an insignificant amount of money. And so like to your point of like customer service, like if I'm going to spend nearly fifty dollars on a on a hardcover book like it.
00:31:22
Speaker
I'm going to want to be entertained and hopefully maybe return to it every now and again. But yeah, it's to your point of wanting to really serve the reader or the customer. And it sounds like that's kind of a sore point for you too. No, the scary thing is, especially with the pandemic and supply chain stuff, this is, I think, going to be a new normal.
00:31:44
Speaker
and publishing. I've had a lot of conversations because I was starting to get texts from friends and things. I saw my book and I was like, hey, man, I've decided not to send my kid to college so that I can buy your book like jokes like that. And it's like, oh, shit, you know, like this is like it's not an inexpensive book. And I've heard from different people in publishing. I've got a friend who's an editor publisher and he was like, my costs have gone up 50 percent. I mean, some people are saying 100 for paper.
00:32:14
Speaker
And I think it's going to be a new normal. Unfortunately, I'm just sort of walking point on that suicide mission. It's like, hey, soldier, would you know? I get to take that initial hit, but I would warn readers, unfortunately, I think it's going to be something to start getting used to. I don't like it any more than anybody else, but there's some realities of the world right now and of publishing.
Industry Insights: Pricing and Publishing Challenges
00:32:42
Speaker
So yes, everything he said. Yeah. And come 2025, I have a book coming out from Mariner Books. And I'm thinking of that too. I'm like, yeah, mine is probably going to be right in that ballpark probably. Well, who knows? I mean, it's going to be about a year from now, a little more than two years from now. So who knows? It could be 50 or 55 by then. So you just have to gird yourself for that.
00:33:11
Speaker
How many pages is yours, do you think? I'm hoping it's my goal is to be something of the size of yours, roughly. So, yeah, I think a lot of this is happening in tiers where because you'll see mine was 512 pages, including the index and the blank pages. The back is about 400 and so of just text. And there are 800 page books that were the same, same price. So anything under five.
00:33:40
Speaker
is like in a certain category. And then I have a, there's a writer acquaintance of mine who actually had the opposite thing happen returned in a very short book and the publisher was like, we can't charge more for this and you're right on the line. So there, yeah, this is inside baseball for publishing, but that was the opposite problem. They were like, you're, this is a little too thin, like, you know.
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah. With the paper costs. So that's a calculus, but that's something that no reader thinks about. They just see a price. And I was talking about this with a screenwriter friend. Some stories just want to be the length they want to be. And I have another friend talking about that. He had written a novel and this novel is like 800 pages. And I was like, you know, you're going to have to get that down. And we talked about it for a long time and he was like, you know,
00:34:26
Speaker
Some stories just want to be the link they want to be. And I think about movies like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the Quentin Tarantino movie. And it's like maybe three hours long. And I remember watching it thinking it didn't need to be a minute shorter. Like I was into it. I was just into everything. Right. Some people might disagree with me. And that came up with my book is I was I kind of value myself on being pretty economical when I write like like capsule summaries and trying to say the most in the shortest space.
00:34:56
Speaker
And I did that with Wanderlust, but as I said before, there's all these little rabbit holes in the story. Like here he is in this crazy play series meeting this crazy person. And there were a ton that I had to leave on the cutting room floor. Like he had this whole relationship with the early miss miss like universe pageant, like all this stuff. And there's certain things I had to leave on the cutting room floor and the things that I kept in the book.
00:35:25
Speaker
I was probably cutting and I'm, I think I'm one of the rare writers and I had an editor once tell this to me. He was just like, you're one of the few people make, you should actually expand on this a little bit more. Usually we're cutting people back or cutting people back. Um, but you're going very, very, very brief on this. And there were a few parts of the book where, and I had great editors on this book. My main editor, he was like, you know,
00:35:51
Speaker
I kind of want more, like this is really interesting. Like I'm reading this section and I just want a little bit more just cause I want to lose myself a little bit in this. And he was like, I never say this, but why don't you just kind of, uh, expand a little bit. And so between drafts, I added all kinds of stuff. And then I got this comment back very genuine. He was like, you know, I said a couple of editors said this. They're like, this never happens.
00:36:18
Speaker
This works better longer. Just stick with it longer. And I, you know, it's a rare, that's a rare thing. I think usually people can say it shorter. But in this case where you're dealing with the life, you're dealing with the century. That is a common I've gotten back on this book to a lot of people use that term lost. Like I got lost in this. Like I just, oh, now I'm here and I'm there.
00:36:41
Speaker
Digressive is sometimes used as a pejorative, but I actually really like it. It's like in Moby Dick, when he's got a whole chapter on whale penises, and you're like, this is great. Just taking that little side detour. I kind of love that book. There's an art to doing it, and it's really tricky. I love books that sometimes just take a break, go off to this place, and there's a way to tie it back to your main story thematically or however you need to do it.
00:37:11
Speaker
But I love that books. So yeah, stories want to be the length they want to be. At what point in your when you're researching something, do you have to eventually
The Persistence in Research and Cold Calling
00:37:24
Speaker
turn turn the faucet off and be like, you know, I could probably go five years researching this, but eventually I do have to sit down the right. So at what point do you have to just be satisfied with what you've got and then and then right from there?
00:37:37
Speaker
Yeah. And I have that tendency to want to exhaust the research just because I know I'm going to leave 90% of it on the cutting room floor. That's a good old saying about writing. It's like, well, how do you write a novel? It's like, well, it's like doing a sculpture of an elephant. You take a block of stone, you just chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. That's kind of like what writing look like this is. I want to know.
00:38:03
Speaker
everything I don't know, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, of all people. But I want to know what I don't know. So you want to just exhaust the topic, see all the angles. Because sometimes you'll see something like, oh, that's really cool, but totally unexpected. I love finding those unexpected aha moments and then really working hard to try to jam them in. Something that might be a little contrarian or kind of swims upstream from the conventions or the orthodoxy on a topic.
00:38:31
Speaker
But you don't know that until you just really go deep. And so, you know, when I, my second book, Wild Minds is history of, uh, you know, classic animation, these old cartoon studios and rivalries between them. I would go through transcripts of old interviews with these guys, because they all died a lot of cases before I was even born. And you're reading a hundred pages and you're like, there was one paragraph of that entire transcript that I really needed, but it was a diamond in the rough.
00:38:59
Speaker
So, as far as your question, when do you know? And, you know, part of it's instinctive. You're just like, I know I have a lot. I've pretty much exhausted, you know, all of my angles. That's also why it's important, I think, to take early manuscripts and get very knowledgeable readers and send it to them. Like, what do I know? So an example from this is I found a guy who kind of became a friend, David Welke. He wrote a book called A
00:39:27
Speaker
a wretched and precarious situation. It was about the Macmillan expedition. And the Macmillan expedition was located just a little bit north of Freiken in Greenland. It was Americans, and I love to use it in the book as a way to kind of reveal a little bit about America at that time, as it was off in the world exploring. And Freiken was friends with a lot of the members of the expedition, or enemies with some of the other members of the expedition.
00:39:52
Speaker
There's a lot of great warm camaraderie there, but also some rivalries. So it's just, you know, it's good for the story. And Welke wrote a whole book about this expedition. That's really going to feature in my book in a couple of chapters. Welke also has written books on golden age Hollywood. And I had been reading his book and going through his sources to find more sources for my own research. And, you know, I always like to call up people like that. So I reach out to him and we start having these phone conversations.
00:40:20
Speaker
And he's, and I sent him an early copy. Like, what did I miss? You know, what did, you know, what should I think about? And he was so great because he had written about golden age Hollywood. He had written about polar exploration. We kind of, you know, there's a lot of residents there. And there were a number of things he pointed out to me that made the book much better, you know, that had just kind of gotten by my, gotten by me. So.
00:40:44
Speaker
It really illustrated me the importance of that finding true subject matter, especially when you're doing a book like mine, which has a lot of capsule summaries in it. A little similar, I would say, like Bill Bryson's One Summer. Lovely book, but it's about the summer of 1927, and he weaves together all these very unrelated things like the New York Yankees at that time, the Sacco and Panzetti trial, Charles Lindbergh taking the first flight over the Atlantic, and he weaves it all together.
00:41:08
Speaker
He's never going super deep, deep, deep into any of those topics. He's just the beauty of the book is weaving them together and seeing how they all relate to each other and existed in this very specific time frame. But there are whole books, many books written that go on much more about each of those little capsule summaries that he's putting together. And in my books, and especially in this one, I have a number of those kind of
00:41:34
Speaker
kind of summaries. So I would reach out to people who had written maybe a little more extensively on it just to have conversations with them. And that was part of my research process. It was very helpful.
00:41:47
Speaker
Yeah. Cause there's, there are moments too. So I'm deep into like newspapers.com right now in the year I'm writing in and it's just like going by certain States and then each County within a state. And then there might be, you know, 80 articles from this County and 40 from the other. And many of them are, are repeats just very familiar with that. Like 10,000 articles about break and when he wins a game show, but they're all picked up off a wire service.
00:42:15
Speaker
and all these small things. Yeah, it's a lot of, yeah. It's a lot of that, but then somewhere along whatever in that pile of garbage, like all that repeat, you'll find one that is like, oh, that's new, or that's a column that is giving a different degree of analysis, or just an opinion, or they had access to a different quote, and you're like,
00:42:44
Speaker
oh shit I went through a hundred and I found this awesome quote and it makes you like it drives you nuts because eventually you have to stop doing that because you're just gonna run out of time but the fact that you found that one it's like that little positive reinforcement that you just if you just keep digging and digging and digging you're gonna keep finding you might find that one diamond in the rough as you said a moment ago and it can drive you insane because you just want to keep on going because you might find that extra detail that no one else saw as you're trying to construct your biography or your narrative
00:43:14
Speaker
Needle in a haystack, it's like starting a march. I was in the military for a little bit after college. You start a big long march and just like, you're looking at that newspapers.com, read out, you're putting in your search terms and you get really good at using Boolean operators and all those kinds of things to try to refine your searches and be a little more sophisticated about it.
Truth and Ambiguity in Nonfiction Storytelling
00:43:37
Speaker
But then you hit that point where it's like, all right, I just got to start shoveling.
00:43:42
Speaker
You got your shovel in your hand and, you know, like, I just got to find the needle here in this pile and you just got to power through. You're like, all right, here I go. Make sure I stay hydrated.
00:43:59
Speaker
and a moment ago you said you just you know you hate the writing and you know so let's let's unpack that a bit like why is writing so you know laborious and why do you hate it so much
00:44:14
Speaker
Well, hate it and love it. Like there are days where I'm having fun, right? You're putting it down and feeling good. Then you finish and you're like, wow, this, this, this came up pretty well. And then you read it the next day and you're like, I hate this. I hate it. And it's like, but then you revise it and then you hate it a little less. And so for me, it's this process of revising until I can like deal with the hatred. And it's not that I hate on it. It can be a wonderful escape. Like, okay, I'm going off to write and I'm an introvert.
00:44:43
Speaker
And so I kind of enjoy being, I, I really like my introvertedness and really enjoys research. Like, I just get to explore and look into stuff and travel around and read. I love that. And the writing, the thing that really gets me out writing is, you know, that it can always be better or you'll do the thing. I'm constantly going to the bookshelf behind me and just pulling off a book while I'm writing and being like, well, how did they put together sentences? You know, this is getting into the nitty gritty of it, but you know, just to kind of re
00:45:11
Speaker
I had an editor once at a reporting gig who told me, yeah, when I'm writing a headline, I just pull up the New York Times. I always need to kind of jumpstart myself with how did you put together the headline again? You know, just because I have to remind myself of that what a thousand times, but it's just, you need that little spark. So I'm constantly, you know, if I hit a moment, I'm like, let me just go refresh myself a little bit, take a walk, or just go read something that I feel like it's put together. And then you realize if you really start digging into somebody else's writing, you're like,
00:45:40
Speaker
They're actually not that smooth here, like this sentence could have been better. But me as a reader, I just kind of skated over that. And then you realize, okay, I'm being a little bit too hard on myself. But for me, it's just you want the thing to sing and you want the reader to kind of forget that you're writing and just sort of be lost in it.
00:46:01
Speaker
So that to me is what I mean by when I say hate is because you know that it can be better. I can organize my thoughts better. How should this be structured when you're really in the writing? You're waking up at three in the morning sometimes with a sentence in your head. You're like, it's like you need an exorcism. It's like, just stop, just stop.
00:46:19
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. And given that you said you're introverted by nature, I'm the same. I'm something of a shy introvert as well. And what drives me, what gives me innumerable belly aches and anxiety is cold calling and even just making phone calls. I just have a lot of stress and anxiety around it, and I hate to, and I'll do anything I can in my power to put off picking up the phone.
00:46:47
Speaker
I wonder for you, do you have any struggles with that? If you do, how do you overcome it? There's muscling through and then sometimes it's just maybe you have some advice for people like myself who have a hard time making cold calls. I personally don't have a problem with it. Everyone's different.
00:47:08
Speaker
I am an introvert by nature, but introverted in the way of I just get restorative energy by sometimes being by myself. I do not lie or dislike being around people. I actually like it. I do need it.
00:47:21
Speaker
Um, so I enjoy sometimes picking up the phone because I can have a human writing is so lonely. Yeah. That part of it, just picking up the random phone and reaching out to another author. I kind of see it sometimes as water cooler chats. Like we don't get to have water cooler chats. Like a lot of people do. So this is, and I found that other writers, they just want to talk too. Cause like, Oh, we just, we're both cloistered away, not, not talking to people. I had a.
00:47:47
Speaker
job in college after my freshman year doing door-to-door sales, like 80 hours a week. Oh yeah, I had a heat stroke. I had guns pulled on me. I mean, I was down in Texas, like rural Texas, like not far from Louisiana doing it around Houston. And so, you know, there'd be neighborhoods where I remember people warning me away, like, oh, don't, don't go there. Those people aren't on the census. Like those people aren't like going into Bayou country and sure enough, it was like you'd go in and it would be like,
00:48:16
Speaker
I don't understand what you're saying. It's like, you know, pigeon English kind of stuff. It's really like there's, and this is in the nineties. And I think maybe it got beat out of me. And I remember being so nervous in the mornings, like you'd almost want to throw up. Like I'm going to go knock on doors. I'm going to be, so maybe that just beat it out of me where I kind of got a fearlessness where I will just go talk to, talk to people. Cause I was sort of forced to buy the job. I needed to make money.
00:48:45
Speaker
So I don't have that problem. I'm sorry. Yeah. Sorry, you do. I wish I had a trick for, you know, it's like the way, you know, people listen to, I remember reading Daniel Day Lewis would listen to Eminem before playing Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York as I got psyched himself up. I wish there was some sort of trick like that to just, okay, you know, shadow box a little bit before you make that call, kind of get your energy up.
00:49:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's it's one of those things where it just the more you do it, the more comfortable you get doing it. And then when you have a nice, a nice conversation like, oh, wow, that was not nearly as bad as I had built it up in my head. Like in my head, I'm like, everyone is going to pick up the phone and be like, oh, fuck you. I'm not talking about him. I'm tired of talking about him. You're a fucking vulture. Get out of my sight. Like that's the voice in my head as I'm making these calls. And then oftentimes I get them on the phone and be like, oh, yeah, cool. I'd love to talk. Let's set up a time.
00:49:39
Speaker
And it's never as bad. And it's it's just a matter of doing that over and over and over again. Be like, OK, you know, yeah, maybe you are going to get that worst case scenario, but it's probably on the way on the right side of the bell curve. And most people are going to be like, yeah, sure, let's let's chat. See what you're saying right there, that's actually very that that antagonistic negative or something. You know, if you're covering someone who's maybe controversial or something like that, I can see that. But
00:50:07
Speaker
that my experience is actually very rare. The opposite is usually two people love to talk about things that they know about or things that they're interested in and you just kind of stay quiet and they'll just go and go and go. They love that chance. So it's usually for me, pretty
00:50:24
Speaker
pretty fun, pretty warm. Like I find that the reception is actually pretty good. Also, my last couple of books, especially it's been about people who are not only dead, but have been dead a while and the people who all knew them are dead. So a lot of my research has to be archival. I mean, I will talk to other historians or people who knew them or family members. The awkward thing for me is when you run into someone
00:50:49
Speaker
who really doesn't know anything about the topic and users are kind of sitting there. Like I've had family members of some of these subjects and they were like, and you realize like they don't really know. They don't, they actually just don't know. Like I'm sitting here coming to them for insights and yeah, they're related to the person, but they don't, they don't.
00:51:10
Speaker
You know, they never personally. Yeah. Yeah. And some people I've spoken to as who were like tied to my central figure and be like, Oh, what do you remember about this? I just, you know, a lot of this stuff is about 50 or 55 years ago. And there's, I just don't remember. I don't, I, I don't know. Oh, I don't remember that person. I might bring up, Oh, that sounds like you were, you know, this person who was there like,
00:51:36
Speaker
Oh, yeah, they just it's just memory gets very slippery. And it's so some of my conversations kind of like yours or get a little awkward. Like, okay, what do you remember about this? If I was running beside you, what would I be seeing? And they're like, I have no idea. I have no memory of it at all. And then I'm like, all right, well, five minutes have gone by. I can see this is not going anywhere. So let's
00:52:00
Speaker
I'll circle back if I have to, if I remember anything else or can come to you for something else. Or if you remember something, feel free to call me. Yeah. And the memory being slippery stuff like it is for everything. And that's something I remember too, is that with nonfiction, there's an attitude sometimes among readers or reviewers or sometimes writers where
00:52:23
Speaker
This book is absolute truth. You know, this is, you know, it's like a police report or something, you know, just the facts. But I always remember this is always going to be filtered through my perspective. Every book you've ever read is filtered through someone's perspective and their biases. And so I embrace that a little bit. It's the way like, you know, Marines and Secret Service agents are all taught to run towards the gunfire. The only people that do that. Everybody else runs away from gunfire. But whenever I encounter that, like a lot of writers I know get
00:52:53
Speaker
bound up a little bit like, Oh, no, like I won't be able to find this absolute truth. And you're like, well, it really doesn't necessarily exist. Like no one really knows. So embrace that embrace. It was for again, he could be a tall tale teller and he could be a rank into his prank. She liked to, you know, when he would tell stories later about some of his expeditions, he might throw into detail or, and I found that overall the larger framework of all of his stories was true. Uh, but there was sometimes a little detail in there where he was pulling your leg just a little bit.
00:53:23
Speaker
that would really bug the hell out of a lot of writers. Cause it's like, I need to determine yes or no black or white, you know, very binary. And I use that to try to illustrate him as a person like, yeah, we don't know for sure, but it was one of these events, you know, it's the same thing happened in my second book, Wild Minds, Walt Disney is a character in there. And Walt told something like six different stories about how Mickey Mouse came to be. And so to me,
00:53:48
Speaker
That wasn't something to be frustrated by like, oh, we won't know the absolute truth, but it really reveals something about him. Like for different audiences, you tell a different story and it ultimately tied back to his creating myth and he was a myth maker. He was a storyteller. And so here he is just always changing the story and stories were loose to him. They were adaptable. Like that's, that's really how it is.
00:54:09
Speaker
Everyone has their different perspective of events as they happened on the ground as well. They have their perspective of how a person is. It's like, you know, in your own personal life, you'll meet people like, well, that person's a jerk or, oh, well, that person's great. You know, people just have different opinions. So I try to keep my writing about such things. I embrace the ambiguity instead of running away from it. I think it scares a lot of people off, but I'm like, I think it can actually support the story if you just acknowledge it and work with it.
Thoughts on Book Review Culture and Reading Diversity
00:54:37
Speaker
Instead of trying to battle battle with it right that kind of reminds me of in The Dark Knight the Batman movie with Heath Ledger as the Joker and he's just he talks to various people he was like did I ever tell you how I got these scars and He goes into a different story each time about how he did it once like my father was a bit of a drinker and
00:54:59
Speaker
And the other one is like, I had a beautiful wife and her face got cut off. She got in deep with the sharks and they cut up her face. And, and the, and the important thing there, it's not how we got the scars. It's the fact that he makes up all these different stories about the scars. What's that say about him? His psychology is mindset to me. That's the important thing. The fact that he's always changing the story. It's not necessarily the specific details of this. In some cases, yes, the specific details are, are important, but.
00:55:28
Speaker
That other thing is just as important, and in a lot of cases, more interesting, and I'm always trying to find the interesting thing. Well, Reed, I want to be mindful of your time, and as I always bring these conversations down for a landing, I like to ask the guests for a recommendation for the listeners, and it can be just anything you're excited about, so I'll extend that to you. What might you recommend for the listeners out there?
00:55:50
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I was thinking about this and for me as a reader, I've been struggling in recent years sometimes to find books to read in that way where like a friend will come up to me and say, you know, did you hear about this book? And I am someone who looks at publishers catalogs. I read review sections, book review sections, and it'll still be something that got kind of past my radar. I'm like, how did that happen? How did I miss this? This is a book right up my alley, you know, or whatever.
00:56:21
Speaker
And especially now I see in book review culture, it's a little bit of a monoculture growing up around it. A lot of things in recent years have been very gloomy. And I think we've been through a lot in this nation in the past five, six years and social media certainly hasn't helped any of that.
00:56:40
Speaker
And it can be very gloomy. And I was looking at new books that are especially in the fiction space. And I think at one point I counted in some publishers catalog the word trauma used in like four out of six book descriptions. And I'm just sort of like, you kind of want to go in and be like,
00:56:59
Speaker
For some of these book sections, especially old legacy kind of media outlets, you kind of want to open the curtains and be like, come on, let's go for a walk. Let's get some sunshine in here. And then publishers, too. And I've done a little bit of writing for Airmail. And Airmail's book section is lovely. It kind of reminds me of some of my favorite book sections from maybe 10 or 15 years ago. It's a little more eclectic.
00:57:27
Speaker
They choose books that I'm not always seeing reviewed elsewhere. And I don't know why, because it'll be a really well-written book by a great author. It's not a very long book section. It's just a few things every week delivered on your weekend. And they'll have these delightful interviews, but they have a light touch. And I really appreciate the light touch. They find stuff that's just kind of fun, but also smart.
00:57:54
Speaker
And isn't just dragging me through constant, you know, constant mud. I actually, in preparation for this question, I figured you're going to ask it. I actually cut this out and put it on the wall, but there was a letter to the editor.
00:58:08
Speaker
in the New York Times a couple years ago. And he writes, reading was once known. This is a guy named Bruce Watson from Massachusetts. And he wrote to the editor, reading was once known as a great escape. And he quotes Emily Dickinson. He says, there's no frigate like a book to take us lands away. And he goes, and I turned to the book review to find books that will sail me far from our sinking ship of state.
00:58:32
Speaker
Yet your last two issues reviewed books on, and it just goes up on this list. You know, Brett Cowan in Afghanistan, stalkers, pervs, and trolls, migration literature, ocean piracy, women crime and obsession, hashtag me too, and more. And he goes, can't the book review find a few more frigates out there? And I just, I laughed when I saw it, because I had so many conversations with friends about this exact thing. And so I've really enjoyed the,
00:58:58
Speaker
because they have that lighter touch. They're finding books that are frigates. And I've really appreciated that. And it's a great read on the weekend to find new stuff to read.
00:59:11
Speaker
That's awesome. I love it. A few more frigates. And I would certainly put Wanderlust on the frigate list for sure, because I think it echoes so much about our current time from a bygone era and just a wildly cool guy that has the vector to tell the story.
Reflections on the Book Proposal Process
00:59:27
Speaker
And you do it masterfully. So I just got to say thank you for the work that you've done. And thanks for taking an hour and coming on the show, Reed. Thanks for having me on. This has been great. And I love the podcast.
00:59:42
Speaker
Hey, thanks for listening, CNFers. Thanks to Reed for first reaching out, pitching his book, and coming on the show. Team Mariner Books, am I right? Again, he's at Reed Mittenbuehler on Twitter and at Mittenbuehler on Instagram. The name of the book, again, is Wanderlust.
01:00:00
Speaker
I've been neck deep, maybe even nose deep, in prefontane research. And I realize how different or more concrete my book proposal could have been had I shown a similar degree of rigor for the proposal in terms of the research.
01:00:18
Speaker
and maybe it wouldn't have been quite as drawn out a process. Questions that my agent had might have had more satisfactory answers. I would have bought myself a few more months to actually do the book research and interview people, which is proving to be, it takes a long time.
01:00:38
Speaker
and not every interview gleans tremendously great insights. So you might spend a half an hour in the phone with someone and it's just like, either they don't have a memory of it or they just have a very simplistic memory or feeling and it's just like, yeah, that doesn't really make the cut anyway. So now you don't wanna do too much research early on because you don't know if the deal will be in place and you don't wanna waste all that time
01:01:07
Speaker
That said, the more research you do, the more confident you become in the material. It's like the developing solution in old school photography if you're in the darkroom with that red light going.
01:01:21
Speaker
The more articles you read or skim and catalog, certain dates in the timeline emerge as these tentpole events of a life. There's naturally a sag on the timeline between tentpoles, and you only really see this.
01:01:39
Speaker
by diving into the archives, be it physical or online. There are a lot of story beats that I just didn't realize were there in the first place, and you realize that when dozens of newspapers are covering the same thing, and they get quotes from here, different quotes from here, whether from here, you're like, okay, that's a moment.
01:01:58
Speaker
And it's not really a waste of time. You think about it, you either front-load the proposal and find out how much there is there, or you start to see the spine of a narrative and two things start to happen. Either there's a lot there and you're more poised to write a dynamite proposal and thus a great book you can deliver on, or you spend a month or two finding out that there isn't really anything there and you can abort and find the next book. In a sense, there's no waste of time at all.
01:02:28
Speaker
Maybe that's the big lesson. I got stuck in thinking, and this is a big mistake now that I look at it in hindsight, that I didn't want to do too much research too early in the process because I didn't want to waste my time in the event that the deal was not going to go through.
01:02:43
Speaker
But you know what happened? The proposal process, necessary as it was, dragged on for a year. Had I been more aggressive in research and cataloging my articles and finding more of those narrative beats, the process might have taken maybe six months.
01:03:00
Speaker
And oh my gosh, right now, my deadline is April 15th, 2024, and what I'd give for six more months, as I am now aggressively making phone calls, still having to do the newspaper stuff and magazine stuff.
01:03:15
Speaker
but it's making several calls a day, something I fucking hate. I'll talk about that next week. I'm just not good enough. I don't like phones. I don't like making phone calls. Anyway, so yes, research as if you already have the deal in place. I guess it's kind of like manifesting too. You know, it's a little woo woo, but it's just like, why even put the thought in me? Like, I don't know if I should research this. It might not come through. Maybe you should research.
01:03:42
Speaker
Like, yeah, this thing is going to happen. I'm going to need this research anyway. Might as well go all in. You need that research. Or soon, maybe you'll find over the course of that research, a month or two, you're like, yeah, this seems like a good idea. Let me spend a month or two just in it.
01:03:59
Speaker
and you might find that there's not enough to sustain a book and then you pivot and you maybe take that material and you read a magazine article or a newspaper article or maybe nothing at all and in the end you only wasted oh let's say a month or two of research and you might have saved yourself some time in the long run so stay wild cnfers and if you can't do interviews see ya
01:04:41
Speaker
you