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Episode 49—Dinty W. Moore on the Gift of Feedback, Reading Like a Mechanic, and Patience
283 Plays8 years ago
DInty W. Moore is the founder of Brevity Magazine and the author of The Story Cure.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey, what's going on CNFers? This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, and I am your host, Brendan O'Mara.
Reminiscing About Fred McGriff
00:00:12
Speaker
You know who was one of my favorite baseball players growing up? Fred McGriff.
00:00:25
Speaker
Brett McGriff was a 6 foot 3 first baseman who tallied 2,490 hits in 493 home runs. He was also born on Halloween, so that's cool.
00:00:42
Speaker
I think I'm out of riff jokes. I think that's the last one I have in the chamber.
Guest Introduction: Dinty Moore
00:00:48
Speaker
So, like I said, anyway, this week on the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, I lassoed Dinty Moore, who is a teacher, editor, founder of Brevity magazine, and whose latest book, The Story Cure, a book doctor's pain-free guide to finishing your novel or memoir.
00:01:09
Speaker
published by 10 Speed Press is out. Retails for $14.99. Go buy it. I get no kickback so take that. Maybe the biggest takeaway
00:01:22
Speaker
From this episode is Denty's attitude when receiving feedback and the gift of writing many, many drafts. But I'll let you be the judge. There's just so much wisdom packed into this episode that I'm just eager for you to get to it. So lastly, need reviews. We're starting to gain a little bit of momentum, but reviews would be killer.
00:01:46
Speaker
Would you be so kind as to review the podcast on iTunes or anywhere else? But yeah, iTunes is sort of the big one. Share this episode with a friend and or subscribe. Hey, thanks for listening. Enjoy this interview with Dinty Moore, episode 49.
Dinty's Writing and Editing Routine
00:02:04
Speaker
You're the director of the creative writing program at Ohio University. You founded Brevity. You've written a dozen books.
00:02:12
Speaker
How do you do all that? How do you manage and how do you structure your life so you can be that sort of productive across so many different sub-genres all within the writing community?
00:02:28
Speaker
Well, thank you for putting such a positive spin on it. There are people who might say I work too much. I'm a little bit too work focused. I mean, it doesn't matter priorities. I don't. I get up in the morning and my job is as writer, editor, teacher, depending on which one is most pressing. But I don't spend a lot of time lingering over breakfast. I get right to work. I almost always eat lunch at my desk.
00:02:57
Speaker
I see some of my colleagues go for long leisurely lunches, and I think, boy, that must be fun, but I never quite do it. So it's really just time management and stubbornness and focus. And there has to be, of course, if you're willing to spend that much time with it, there has to be, on some level, a deep love of the language and the work as well. So where does that come from?
The Love for Reading and Writing
00:03:25
Speaker
You know, I don't know. I mean, I guess from years and years and years of reading and writing. But unlike a lot of other writers, I look back to my childhood. We didn't have books around the house. I don't know that I was read to as a kid. I have no memory of that. My mom loved newspapers. So I did, you know, early on start reading newspapers, which is very different than
00:03:54
Speaker
novels and literary works. My mother's focus on what was in the newspaper made me want to read the newspaper. Eventually I wrote for newspapers. How I got from there to the kind of writing I do now or writing books that focus on literary writing, I don't really know. It just seemed to be
00:04:14
Speaker
I fell in love with language somewhere along the way and thought, boy, these moving words around in a sentence. Every time you move them, the sentence changed a little bit and that, you know, some people get bored by that. I was just fascinated and I still am. I was, you know, revising for about two hours this morning, revising a 4,000 word article I'm working on.
00:04:38
Speaker
It's got lost in it. It's like, man, I just changed that one word and this paragraph is so much better or I just moved that sentence up two paragraphs and the thing suddenly
00:04:48
Speaker
makes much more sense. I get excited about that. Yeah, you allude to that in the Story Cure, too, that once you're able to get the clay down and that the revision part and the shaping of all those words, you get a big charge out of that. And I think maybe a good chunk of that book is getting writers to that point so that they can enjoy that revision process, that you've done a good chunk of that first work.
00:05:18
Speaker
Now it's time to start shaping it for someone other than yourself.
Revising Drafts: Process and Passion
00:05:22
Speaker
So what about your sort of writerly constitution really appeals to that revision process versus maybe the generative process? Good question. I hate the blank page because it's like, what am I going to put down here? How am I ever going to come up with anything coherent and interesting?
00:05:45
Speaker
one of the strengths, I thought I'm going to count this as a strength. I don't mind the fact that my early drafts and my second drafts and my third drafts and my fourth drafts are clearly lousy. You know, when I go in and find horrible sentences and horrible paragraphs, I don't think, Oh God, I hate myself. I'm a bad writer. I think, you know what? I can actually fix this. You know, this is one of those few times in life where you get a second chance. So, um,
00:06:14
Speaker
And the idea that I have an editor coming back at me and saying, no, this isn't very good enough. You've got to work on it harder. Or as I get older and more experienced as a writer to have the editor in my brain say, you know, this isn't good enough. This is just really kind of flat. You need to work on it harder. That doesn't hurt my feelings. It makes me kind of excited to get back in there and start moving words and paragraphs and sentences around again. So that's what I mean about ego is like my feelings don't get hurt.
00:06:42
Speaker
if something's not working quite yet. In fact, I expect that.
00:06:47
Speaker
when I point it out to myself or an outside reader or editor points it out to me, you know, I don't curl up into a little ball. I go, yeah, cool. Okay, let me see what I can do. Right.
Embracing Criticism in Writing
00:06:58
Speaker
And how long do you think it took you to reach that point of, it takes a certain degree of confidence to say like, you know, my worth isn't tied to these early drafts and to then be able to see it for what it is and then
00:07:15
Speaker
and then be able to work through and revise and not have your ego attached to the, as Anne Lamont might say, the shitty first drafts. So how long did it take you to sort of develop that muscle? Another odd answer is I think I had it at the beginning. I'm very insecure about many, many things. If you have three hours, I could start listing them right now. But this particular insecurity, it's like I remember
00:07:43
Speaker
you know, from well, the first fiction workshop I ever took, short story writing, I brought my, my, my lovely, wonderful, what I thought was finished, delightfully funny story and and the, and the professor, David Bradley, just took it apart piece by piece by piece and, you know, referred to it with in very unflattering, profane terms and found
00:08:10
Speaker
you know, found flaws in every sentence and inconsistencies of character on every page. And ultimately, it was a gigantic cliche of a story. And I was like, man, that is so cool. Look at what he did. He really understood, you know, what's going on there and how to fix it. And I got really excited. And I mean, he was a very formative part of my writing process. I not only wanted to fix the story that he had
00:08:40
Speaker
pointed out for in a 45 minute diatribe was, you know, failing in every category. But I remember leaving, I was in Philadelphia that I remember leaving that classroom thinking, man, I want to learn to do what he does. You know, I want to learn how to, how to see that stuff in my writing and other people's writing and that led eventually, eventually not right away to me going to graduate school and trying to train myself to be able to see inside of a story.
Critical Reading and Writing Skills
00:09:06
Speaker
and not just say, you know, I really love that or I didn't like it so much, but to really like a mechanic looks into a car engine, really be able to look at the moving parts and figure out, you know, what's working and what isn't working and where the oil is leaking. So how can, because clearly this is something that can be learned. So, and it was something that that your professor
00:09:32
Speaker
enlightened you to. So how can a novice, a novice writer, reader sort of cultivate that, that degree of insight and x ray reading as Roy Peter Clark might call it? Like, how can that be learned? Even if you're even if you're a step above a novice to be a better reader, which ultimately makes you a better writer? Practice, not the first one to ever say this, but
00:10:01
Speaker
If I'm reading somebody else's work, I mean, even people I worship like Joan Didion, sometimes I read for pleasure, but you know, but I've trained myself to, to read, well, to read like a mechanic. It's like, okay, this is so good. That paragraph was so powerful. I stop, I go back, I look at it and say, no, why? What is it she did? You know, it's often what's left out. It's, you know, it says she gave you cheat. In this case, Joan Didion gives
The Role of Play in Writing
00:10:28
Speaker
you just enough
00:10:29
Speaker
that you that you and your own you the reader are putting things together in your head and and little fireworks are going off in the back of your brain leading you right up to it and then letting you realize it rather than you know hitting the reader over the head telling you over explaining which sort of kills the moment. Yeah. So so I you know I read other people's work masters or you know I'm a professor so I read some students who haven't quite mastered how a sentence works yet.
00:10:58
Speaker
I stop and think, why? What is broken here? Or why is this such a good sentence? What is this doing that makes me smile or stiffens my spine as I read? And eventually I learned to do that with my own work. It's like I'm not reading it as like, well, is it good enough? Do I like myself? Do I suck? Am I a writer? I'm actually dispassionately thinking, OK, let's look at this paragraph.
00:11:27
Speaker
Here's what's working. Here's what's not working. What if I push this word over here? What if I just take that middle sentence out? What if I move the last sentence to the beginning of the paragraph? It's like a, you know, it's like a puzzle or about David Bradley, also the professor I referenced earlier, also sort of talked about child play and, you know, sitting in the sandbox and just pushing sand around and making a sand castle. You know, that kid who's doing that isn't
00:11:56
Speaker
isn't worried about getting published someday or getting tenure someday or becoming famous someday. He's just playing with sand because it's fun and I try to get into that mood with words and sentences.
00:12:08
Speaker
Yeah, I try to talk about that a lot with people, about maintaining a degree of play and fun in the process of writing, because there's this stigma that you should be this tortured writer and this tortured artist.
Balancing Excitement in Writing
00:12:22
Speaker
But in reality, if you're having fun and just playing with the magic of these words and the magic of the language,
00:12:30
Speaker
Fact is, it's gonna be a great experience for the reader and why, I mean sure there is gonna be some tough subject matter to wrap your head around. It's not all gonna be a frolic in the field of flowers. Really? Yeah. Imagine that. But if you, like you said, just maintaining that degree of play and that childlike view of it, it makes for a much better process and will probably unlock a deeper reservoir of your taste, if you will.
00:12:59
Speaker
Sure. I mean, I don't want to be Susie Sunshine. Like you said, there are days that are just horrible. I'm just sitting there pushing my pencil or pushing the delete key and thinking, oh, my God, I just don't have anything here. There are lousy days like that, but you can't live there for very long. And I also agree with what you just implied, which is if you're if you're fascinated with the subject you're writing about, if you're having fun, especially if you're trying to write something humorous, if you're
00:13:28
Speaker
you know, just engage with the process. It comes off the page, comes off the sentences and the readers, the readers sense that. Whereas if you're slogging through, you know, deep and insecurity, you know, the reader is going to sense that too. It's a little bit like, you know, a little bit like acting. You know, you've seen, you see an actor on the stage who's just inhabiting that character. And there's something so, so magnetic about that. You can't take your eyes off him.
00:13:55
Speaker
And you see an actor who's kind of stiff and unsure and nervous and anticipating. And it's like, yeah, it's kind of hard to watch.
Navigating Writing and Editing Stages
00:14:11
Speaker
the editor hat can creep into the process a little too early. And I wonder how you divorce the two, especially in your generative first draft phases. So you're not editing as you're writing. You're just letting it lose having that play and then putting the editor hat on later once you have that ball of clay that you reference in the story here. So how do you navigate those two poles? I do edit a little bit in the first draft.
00:14:41
Speaker
Actually, I think I'm just correcting typos because I don't type very well. I'm trying to make sense in a first draft. It's not just spewing or stream of consciousness, but if I type a bad sentence and it's not really that interesting, I don't even go back and delete it sometimes. I just type a new sentence hoping I just layer on all these sentences. Like many writers, if I wake up on a Thursday morning and I'm talking about the very, very first draft of something,
00:15:10
Speaker
If I wake up on a Thursday morning and type, type, write two and a half, three pages of something, you know, by the next morning, maybe a half of the page, you know, remains. And I get up, I read it, I delete all the boring stuff and there's half of a page. And then I start, you know, building up some sort of structure around that to see where it goes. And then I have a new four pages, you know, at the end of the day. And the next day I go in and I look at it and say, yeah, well, you got about a page worth of interesting material there.
00:15:40
Speaker
And even that's not that interesting. There's so many different metaphors. It's sort of a process of carving away or building up the clay until it starts to look like an elephant or starts to look like whatever it is you think you're trying to make a sculpture of. Am I answering your question? Not really. Oh, yeah. No, absolutely. I know what phase I'm at. It's like if it's really early on and it's not quite making sense yet.
00:16:08
Speaker
I have a voice in my head that I've cultivated that says, just hang in there, Dinty, just keep working at this. You know, one of these days you're going to come in and look at it and go, oh, wait, wait, now I see what it's about. Um, I also know that 2030 drafts in, or certainly if I'm on deadline of some sort, you know, there's a point at which I have to put on my editor's hat and say, you know, stop playing around here, figure out what it is you're talking about. And I also, my, my,
00:16:36
Speaker
I think my students hate me, I'm not sure. But I think what they do, they hate me for this. I have my mean New York editor hat. You know, and I use it on them, but I also use it on myself. It's like, okay, I'm mailing this off or nowadays emailing this off in three days. I put that mean, mean New York editor hat on and just say, Come on, come on. Is that a good opening? Are you just kind of
00:17:01
Speaker
fell in love with it, but it's not really working. Come on. Come on. Is that the best analogy you can make here? Wait a minute. Look at all those flat verbs. I'm aware of where I am in the process and sort of take on different inner voices on myself, on my own work as I'm working my way up the hill.
Exploring Varied Writing Interests
00:17:23
Speaker
So as you were developing as a young writer, and like you said, you grew up reading newspapers, not necessarily books and literature. Actually, let me add something else. I grew up with my mother and my two sisters. My dad wasn't around. So I'd sit by the mailbox, which kind of came into the front porch of the house, the enclosed front porch, and the mailman would push the mail through.
00:17:49
Speaker
And it would be like some bills and Ladies Home Journal and Seventeen and Red Book. And I kind of grew up reading ladies magazines or women's magazines and the newspaper. It's like I was hungry. It's like whatever there was to read, I wanted to read it.
00:18:07
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and how do you, at what point did you start to graduate towards some of the, some of the literature that you like reference and a lot of your work, especially in the story here, like, at what point did those start to creep into your vernacular? Yeah, most of the school library, I mean, in grade school, you know, I'm talking about second, third, fourth grade, these are very simple books, but I kind of got turned on as a whole world of books out there.
00:18:35
Speaker
And then later on in grade school, certainly high school, I know that I fell in love with Dickens somewhere in high school. I might want to go towards the more literary work. Dickens spoke to me the minute I picked him up, something about the humor. Same thing with Vonnegut. The day I discovered Vonnegut, I read all the way through Slaughterhouse-Five and then just went to the library and said, give me everything Vonnegut ever wrote and went through them.
00:19:04
Speaker
One at a time. Yeah, I had that similar experience of Vonnegut. Libraries were a revelation to me. I also started reading nonfiction books, but not Orwell or literary nonfiction. I wanted to read every book about the Marx Brothers. Has it ever been written? And Harpo's autobiography is actually a memoir. It's actually a really wonderful book.
00:19:30
Speaker
And I wanted to read every book on WC Fields ever written. And I wanted to read every book about aquarium fish. It's like I wanted to fill my brain with information. Libraries get on these little kicks, which is what I love about being a writer, because you can still do that. It's like I'm not filling out the same insurance forms every day for the rest of my life as a job. It's like I get excited about something, and I say I'm going to write an essay about it.
00:19:56
Speaker
I get obsessed with something. I said, I'm going to write a short story about that. I got really obsessed with something. I said, you know, I'm going to try to figure out if there's a book there. That's a real gift. Just pursue your fascinations and curiosities and obsessions that way.
Finding Story's True Theme
00:20:14
Speaker
And somebody say, yeah, good job. I'm glad you did that.
00:20:19
Speaker
And at the beginning of the story here, you spend a lot of time and valuable time right at the start talking about the heart story and maybe what Tom French might call like the engine. And how important is that to try to flesh that out as early as possible, but also because sometimes it takes maybe
00:20:42
Speaker
100 pages, maybe more to really get to the heart of it, to maybe, to not get stumped by the idea of I haven't found my heart yet, but I still have to keep going. So yeah, how do you how do you cultivate that? For me, the heart story is simply what is this really, really about? You know, in fiction, a guy moves to Indianapolis and something happens and something else happens. And then, you know, there's some reason danger. So that's the plot. But what's it really about?
00:21:10
Speaker
you know, which is often something like regret or something like, you know, deep insecurity, something about, you know, working out a problem from the past. That's, you know, that's what heart story is. I do a better job in the book, I hope, than I did just then. And, you know, it's a real gift if you sit down to write something fiction or nonfiction memoir or novel short story or essay through a gift, if you sit down and you're kind of, you kind of know what it is that's driving you.
00:21:38
Speaker
But I often don't. I often, as I've said earlier in this interview, I'm just fiddling around trying to find that nugget, that nugget of something that's got the power in it or that part of the story, that sentence. It's got the electrical vibration running beneath it. I'm going to turn the question around a little bit and say, the people I know who fail as writers, students who
Patience and Persistence in Writing
00:22:08
Speaker
They can write a sentence. They're smart. They have a great vocabulary, but they're not just never going to make it as a writer because they lack patience or they lack stubbornness. It's like they write something. Well, this is it. This is how good it is. And that's, you know, what do you think? Um, whether it's a matter of not knowing what the heart of your story is and what your heart story is right away.
00:22:33
Speaker
whether it's a matter of having to revise your sentences and paragraphs 47 times, which I have to before I'm satisfied with them, you have to be patient. You can't just expect it all to come out or to know it all or to see it all. When you sit down to write, you don't wake up in the morning and think, boy, I'm going to write a 10-page short story and I know everything about it. First of all, that's boring because you need to be open to discovering something
00:23:04
Speaker
as you write, but it just doesn't happen that way. So whatever it is that isn't quite working in your draft today, whether it's a draft of an essay, a draft of a book length memoir, a draft of a novel, whatever it is that isn't working, you have to be patient. You have to kind of keep working on other parts of the book despite the fact that you haven't quite figured out what the heart of the book is yet, and you have to be patient and trust that you're going to get there eventually.
00:23:34
Speaker
yeah i what in speaking with uh... mary heather noble and kim kankowitz for essays that they wrote for creative non-fiction that one prizes editors prize in some other contest specifically that those particular essays that one essentially became were like they put in the drawer they had that patience because there was just something that didn't crystallize quite yet they knew something was there but they just act there was a something missing in in kim's case she needed a certain
00:24:04
Speaker
prompt. It was like a joy prompt. And then she was able to shoehorn this essay that she had had for a while and then it coalesced and crystallized. So it's just sometimes the drawer might be the best place for a piece of writing and just to let it gestate there for months or years sometimes. That's worked for me countless times.
00:24:23
Speaker
So what do you think is the biggest problem you see when you've got your book doctor hat on, when you're trying to diagnose somebody's writing in whatever stage of the process
Improving the Narrative Through Editing
00:24:37
Speaker
they're in? What things do you typically see among people trying to bring something that's of publishable quality? Right. Attachment holding on, holding on to ideas, scenes, characters,
00:24:54
Speaker
um, metaphors, you know, it's hard to let go of. It's hard to say, boy, I worked on this, this part of this book for three weeks. And guess what? Boom. All I learned in those three weeks is that the character doesn't actually go there. It's a memoir. You know, I worked on this, this scene from my childhood for three weeks trying to bring it to life. And then, you know, all I realized was boom, the scene from my childhood doesn't really actually belong in this book.
00:25:26
Speaker
The, you know, the manuscripts that are brought to me short or long, the biggest problem I find to be very general is there's a lot of material in there. It might be well written, but it's not taking the reader anywhere. It's either
00:25:44
Speaker
off-subject. A subject sounds a little too directive when you're talking about literary writing, but it is not in the universe. It's either it's not in the universe of the story. It doesn't fit organically with the story, even if it's true or it's repetitive. It's telling the reader, showing the reader, illustrating for the reader beautifully something that the reader already knows. And the story's got to move on. You've got to take us someplace else.
00:26:14
Speaker
And sort of piggybacking on that and also the heart story is this invisible magnetic river that you write about, which is this great metaphor of how to pull people along for the story however long or broad it may be.
Emotional Pull in Storytelling
00:26:32
Speaker
And I was wondering if maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how you came to that metaphor and what it means to you and how you sort of implement that in a lot of your teaching and coaching.
00:26:44
Speaker
Yeah, it started with teaching because my students would come in and they learned this as I did, you know, from their high school English teachers. They came in and say, what is this? We're talking about a workshop now where the students are writing their own stories. In this case, it was a fiction workshop. You know, and I'd say, well, what is the theme of this? And I'd be scratching my head thinking, you know, and I probably use that term too. In fact, I did in my early teaching, but I started scratching my head thinking theme.
00:27:12
Speaker
Doesn't theme apply to dead white European authors from the 17th century? Isn't theme what Melville did with Moby Dick? That's an awfully big thing to be talking about in a sophomore college creative writing class. These guys just need to learn to write a story, not a deep theme. So I just kind of walked away from that term.
00:27:38
Speaker
that sort of morphed my students, you know, have their own liners. Like, what does this story mean? Or what do you often hear this in poetry classes? What does this poem mean? It's it was just a riddle to be solved or as if the reader was a code breaker. And that's very dissatisfied with that. Well, story doesn't mean a story takes you someplace and it's alive. And you feel that person's life. It doesn't mean something if you feel something as a reader.
00:28:06
Speaker
So I struggled around and I came up with my own metaphor, which is, you know, the invisible magnetic river. That's what holds a story together. That's what all the parts of a story, fiction or nonfiction, have to attach to, this invisible magnetic river somehow. Not a theme, not a meaning, and certainly not a moral.
00:28:30
Speaker
which is becoming only useful in religion class, but an invisible magnetic river of emotion. So it's invisible. You don't want, as I said earlier, you don't want to hit the reader over the head with it. You don't want to say, this is what my story means. That's as dull for the reader. It's magnetic because it's all the various moving parts of your fiction or nonfiction narrative.
00:28:57
Speaker
should be leaning towards it or being pulled magnetically, pulled toward it. Otherwise, it doesn't belong there. That scene or that character or that image or that moment that you're recounting on the page, it isn't pulling, you know, if it isn't in a magnetic pull relationship with this underground river of emotion, then it doesn't belong in the book or it doesn't belong in the story or it doesn't belong in the essay. That's the magnetic part of it. So invisible, magnetic and then river.
00:29:26
Speaker
And the thing I like about the river metaphor is the river is very strong. Rivers are pulling forward just with great power. They have these currents that just, but they don't go in a straight line. Rivers move. They meander. They slow down at certain places because it widens. They speed up at certain places because you hit the rapids. So in terms of storytelling, I want the story always to be moving forward.
00:29:56
Speaker
but it's not like you're on a train and every single track is absolutely straight, locked in from beginning to end. I like the meandering, sets of a river when I'm on a river. I'm actually on a river in a canoe. I like the meandering sense of a river. Well, I like it in stories that I read as well. As long as it's moving forward, the river doesn't ever stop and just go sideways for no good reason. It's always moving forward.
00:30:25
Speaker
Yeah, and I think the physicist, I think his name, he came up with Bernoulli's principle or something, and it's basically like when you constrict something, it will speed up. And if you widen it, it kind of slows down. So it's kind of like putting your thumb over the hose, and it starts spraying out. So it's like what the river matter for. The more you narrow it and narrow its focus, like the pace picks up. So you can just keep going with that, and it's such a great,
00:30:54
Speaker
great little, a great thing to play with in terms of like visualizing where your story is going. So it's like you've, you've really hit upon a really, really sort of resonant note there by using that as the metaphor, I think. Thank you. Thank you.
00:31:29
Speaker
I'm pleased to
00:31:31
Speaker
Uh, it has to connect on a different, different level.
Writing for Self and Reader
00:31:36
Speaker
And, um, you know, it's because it's not, if it's done well, Cheryl straight story is, it's not hers anymore. It, the reader overlays their experience. So like with, as a, as a writer, how do you think you can balance the writing of a story for yourself and then ultimately have a re an end product where the reader is in mind too? Cause there's kind of that balancing act.
00:31:36
Speaker
hear
00:32:02
Speaker
I'm very reader focused. I'm very much aware at every stage, even though, you know, at beginning stages, early drafts, I'm, I'm writing bad sentences and giving myself permission to write bad sentences and, and writing paragraphs go nowhere and giving myself permission to do that because that's part of the explorer exploring process, you know, trying to find what this is really about or where the words are that are going to bring this to life.
00:32:29
Speaker
But even at that stage, I'm aware that, you know, this is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me, just because I read a lot of memoir, a lot of nonfiction, just because it happened to me. Which inherently makes it interesting to me, because it's my life doesn't mean anybody else is going to be interested. So I'm very hyper aware of the audience. And as I get into the middle drafts and as I'm moving towards, you know,
00:32:53
Speaker
This thing is going to be done in a few weeks. If I just keep working on it, I get really aware. If there is an audience, somebody's going to have to read this. How am I going to keep that audience awake? What possible value is Brendan going to get by spending a half an hour of his time reading this? It's a conscious process. Because more and more conscious, the further along I am, the closer I feel like I am to the finish line. But I read it out loud to myself and think,
00:33:23
Speaker
You know, okay, where's Brendan or where is my imaginary reader getting bored here? What's on this page that makes him want to read the next page? What is my reader learning here? And even more importantly, what is my reader becoming curious about here so that when she gets
00:33:43
Speaker
four or five pages further in, and she starts to get the answer to her questions. There's that pleasurable moment of what a lot of writing does, which raises questions in the reader's mind, and then slowly begins to answer them or bring the reader towards an answer. So I'm struggling, but it's almost like conducting an orchestra. And when I get to that stage, it's like I'm really thinking about
00:34:11
Speaker
what the experience is for the reader at each paragraph and where I'm going to lose the reader out of pure boredom or confusion or the reader just doesn't care. So what? And how do I make that not happen? How do I give the reader? And there's various ways to do this. It could be simply suspense. It could be just a fascinating character or
00:34:38
Speaker
or, you know, the world you bring to life on the page is alive enough that the reader is enjoying being there. Sometimes it's simply the pleasure of language, the way something is told is not just one way to keep the reader on the page or if there was, we all write murder mysteries. But there's got to be something and I'm very audience aware and hyper audience aware as I get near what I think is the final two or three drafts of something.
00:35:06
Speaker
In the book, you also sort of allude to how some, a lot of your students, they have this, there's a phase in their process where all they're doing is like talking about this book that they have in their
Transitioning to Actual Writing
00:35:22
Speaker
head. So a lot of people, they've got this perfect vision in their head, but then ultimately you got to sit down and
00:35:27
Speaker
get real acquainted with how ugly the process is. So I wonder, like, how do you get those people from the talk about phase to putting them putting them in the chair and getting them to sort of divorce the perfect vision in their head and get some work done and get the work done? How do you get there? I don't always I mean, that's, I can't do it for them. I mean, I talked to them about it. I think there's a lot of
00:35:57
Speaker
power in writers like you and me and and other writers much more accomplished, you know, just saying to younger writers, guess what? It's a slog. It's hard. You know, guess what? This isn't my first draft. This is this is my 43rd draft. It's written that's very deliberately constructed to sound fresh, as if it were a first draft, but it doesn't happen that way. So it's
00:36:23
Speaker
There's a little bit of psychological coaching or just, you know, being a friend to younger writers, and the younger writers could be older than me, but not by younger, I mean newer to the process. You know, a certain amount of it is just saying, guess what? You know, all those insecurities you have, Stephen King has them too. I have them too. Joan Didion has them. You know what? All those deep concerns you have that you might fail? Yeah, you might.
00:36:51
Speaker
But so what? And you throw it away and you start another project. I think just sort of helping people work through the bad inner voices, the insecurities, the fear of failure, and giving them permission or encouraging them to give themselves permission to not be a genius, you know?
00:37:19
Speaker
if I'm gonna write writers who sit down and they write something and they look at it and go, well, I'm not a genius. So I guess I won't ever do this again. I'm not a genius. I'm a guy who works real hard at my writing and I've been lucky to have some editors who publish what I write. So it's
00:37:38
Speaker
How do I get people to stop talking about the writing and actually do it? I think it's getting them over that initial hump. And then some of them do it and I'm amazed. You know, what they show me a week later or I run into them at a conference five years later and man, they've really taught themselves to become much more
00:38:00
Speaker
powerful and dedicated writers, and they were when I first met them. And then sometimes, you know, people sit down and get started and say, this is too hard, and they stop. And I can't fix that for them. Maybe they weren't, maybe they were meant to do something else. That's fine, by the way, you don't have to be a writer. That's not a, that's not a, if you try to write something and then you give up halfway through, you know, that doesn't make you a failure as a human being, it might mean
00:38:27
Speaker
might mean you're a failure as a writer, but might just mean you're a failure on that particular project and you're going to find another project six months later, but it doesn't make you a failure as a human being. It's just writing. It's not your self worth that's on the line here. A lot of people think it is, especially if they're writing personal stories, if they're writing a novel that's very much based on their family or their life or their marriage, or they're writing a memoir that by definition is very much
00:38:53
Speaker
very personal and based on their own experience. You know, they do sometimes feel like their whole purpose as a human being on this planet is online, on the line. It's not, you know, you're trying to write a book and a book's really hard and all we're going to determine at the end of a year is whether you're able to write that, a good first draft of that book. We're not going to determine whether you're
00:39:16
Speaker
a successful human being or not. Be good to your family. That defines a successful human being. Right. I think you made just an important note in that. You're like, oh, I might be on draft 43. And I think that's
00:39:32
Speaker
I think that in itself is very enlightening to someone who thinks that it has to be good even after two or three passes. You rarely ever hear anyone talk about double digit drafts or double digit pass-throughs of something. And I know that's the things I've written. I mean, I'm in the several dozens of
00:39:54
Speaker
rereads all through beginning to end, trying to move this, that, the other, prune big limbs, small limbs, this, that, and the other.
Refining Writing Through Revisions
00:40:01
Speaker
So, like, to hear, yeah, to hear you say, like, yeah, it's 40 drafts, like, that's not uncommon, that's how you work. I think that, I think that in terms will maybe lighten the, well, like, sort of make the barrier to go through those drafts more, more porous for people to work through it.
00:40:20
Speaker
It's helpful to me because it's kind of repeating some of what I said earlier maybe. If I'm on my fourth draft of a 20-page essay, although I wouldn't have 20 pages by my fourth draft, I'm still struggling with the first five pages maybe, and I look at it and I go, God, this is some really obvious ideas in here expressed in really flat sentences, and this is no there there.
00:40:48
Speaker
Um, I don't panic. It's like, yeah, that's kind of what these early drafts are like. And I know I have another 30 drafts before I'm going to get it in any sort of a shape to show an editor. Um, that's kind of the freedom in that though, you know, you can, you can, it's a class half full glass, half empty. Oh my God. 40 drafts. That's so much work. I'm so discouraged. How could I ever do 40 drafts of anything? Well, flip down on it, you know, flip that upside down. It was like, man,
00:41:19
Speaker
doesn't matter if my fourth draft sucks. I got 35 more drafts. I did the math wrong right there. But you know, I got dozens of more drafts to write. I know I'm going to get it right. I know I'm going to find something interesting tomorrow. I know if I just push it this by Friday, I'm gonna have pages of interesting material. It's okay if it's not working right now. That's the kind of freedom that goes with
00:41:44
Speaker
being a bull of a reviser. It's like how you chose to view David Bradley's feedback as the gift that it was to you years ago. It's like, oh, this is
00:41:59
Speaker
I get to do more. You just unlocked more possibilities. I get to write more drafts. It's a great way to spin it. You didn't tie your value to that feedback. It was the work and he was actually trying to just make you a better worker. So it made you better. You weren't personally slighted. You were like, oh great, this is the gift that it is.
00:42:26
Speaker
Yeah, I like to use the tennis metaphor sometimes. I don't know if you play tennis, but let's pretend you don't. If I took you out to the tennis court and handed you a racket and started lobbing balls towards you, very easy soft balls that were right where they needed to be, you still kind of swat at them and miss most of them and hit the ones that you do hit into the net.
00:42:51
Speaker
And some people give up, I guess. They say, I don't like tennis. But if you had at least any interest in tennis, you'd go back the next day and try again. And eventually, you'd hit two balls back across the net and go, oh, oh, oh, I get it. And then you'd work at it and work at it. And you might not get to the Wimbledon. But after a couple of months of hitting tennis balls three times a week, you suddenly like hitting tennis balls.
Developing Unique Writing Voice
00:43:17
Speaker
And then if you're hungry for it, you say, OK, how do I hit tennis balls really well?
00:43:21
Speaker
Um, you know, that's kind of the process of becoming a better writer. You aren't born. I mean, it would be a shame if the first short story I ever wrote and took into David Bradley's workshop at Temple University in Philadelphia, you know, if that was like proof of what I was capable of. Well, it wasn't proof of what I was capable of. It's actually was really minuscule, early flawed, um, amateur work.
00:43:49
Speaker
And David Bradley showed me that, you know, just come out here and let me show you how to hold the racket and let me show you, you know, where to put your feet and you can actually improve your own tennis stroke.
00:44:02
Speaker
to where you're actually going to hit some tennis balls. And your own tennis stroke, whether that be a two-handed backhand or backhand slice or heavy topspin, that in and of itself is like tennis metaphor for voice.
00:44:20
Speaker
You talk a lot about voice, too, as like the heart story in the beginning and then towards the middle. It's like, all right, this tricky thing that's voice and how to cultivate it is sort of a question that's always on the forefront of a lot of writers and teachers, I'm sure. So maybe how did you develop your voice and how can people
00:44:41
Speaker
practice those tennis strokes to get to a point where it's no longer copying and piecemeal, but it is something that is wholly sort of original to the person. Right, right. Well, first of all, a voice doesn't have to be wholly original to the person. I mean, let's do sound alike. Some people, some tennis players, you watch them and say, man, that Andre Agassi, his game is so different than anybody else's game. But you watch a lot of tennis players and
00:45:10
Speaker
They look like they're doing some of the same things. Yeah, especially true for golf. Yeah. So yeah, boy, my goodness, yes. They're like robots to the guys at the top of their game and the ladies. Let's get off sports for a minute. Voice. Voice is really hard to talk about and teach. And I don't want to be one of those teachers who says, well, you know, you'll know it when you see it. That's a very unsatisfying answer.
00:45:43
Speaker
I'll begin by talking about myself while I panic in the background trying to think if I can say something smart about how I teach this to other people. I acquired my own voice by sort of returning to it. Like many, many writers, when I started writing serious work with a serious tone, I didn't sound like myself. I kept trying to sound like somebody else.
00:46:08
Speaker
I tried to sound more authoritative than I am. I tried to sound more, um, more learned than I am. I tried to sound more literary than I am. And eventually I just sort of said, yeah, you know, didn't you, you know, you've got a way of telling stories when you're talking to your friends. Um, maybe that's the way you should tell stories when you're talking to the page. It's a little bit of conceit. You obviously, you know, I'm talking to my friends, I'm interrupting myself and humming and eyeing and,
00:46:37
Speaker
and rambling around in a way that my friends just stick around, because they're my friends, because I'm buying the beer. And when I'm writing on the page, I need to be aware of cleaning it up and making it flow, aware of the rhythm, or where am I constricting the river, and where am I widening the river? But still, it's kind of telling a story, fiction and nonfiction again. I don't think, I mean, there are differences between fiction and nonfiction, God knows, but this idea of voice,
00:47:07
Speaker
There's not a big difference there. Telling the story the way you would tell a story to a really good friend. Emphasizing and spending time on the things that really matter to you. Using the expressions that you used or heard people use in that small town in Indiana where you grew up not trying to sound like you went to Harvard unless you went to Harvard.
00:47:32
Speaker
that, you know, to me, voice to me, my own voice sort of came when I got comfortable enough with being myself on the page, being a version of myself on the page, you know, I hope I know I'm more articulate, articulate on the page than I am in person, because I revised those sentences, right? I've had so much repetition in this in this, in this interview so far.
00:47:58
Speaker
And if it was going to be published, I'd go back and take the repetition out because that's what you have the privilege and opportunity to do in writing. But just relax and be yourself and use the phrasing that makes sense to you. And you don't want to use language so obscure that you lose the reader, but actually a little bit of the weirdness of your central Indiana small town
00:48:28
Speaker
way of speaking gives gives gives flavor to your writing and then the reader enjoys that how to push other people towards their voice is again kind of pointing maybe just pointing a finger at where where the where the writing stiffens and pointing a finger at no no no no right here look see what you did right there that's actually very alive on the page can you do more of that you tell a joke on page five why did it take five pages for you to lighten up and tell a joke or
Inception of Brevity Magazine
00:48:58
Speaker
or you're being very vulnerable on page five. Let's say it's not a funny piece. You feel really human and you're expressing your own doubt on page five. Why did it take you five pages to get there? Let's start in that place.
00:49:13
Speaker
And taking a little side road, I wanted to briefly talk about, sorry for the pun, briefly talk about brevity. And what was the motivation to founding an online journal that was focused on a 750-word or shorter essay?
00:49:36
Speaker
I never imagined we're celebrating our 20th year. I knew it was a while. It'll be our 20th year of publishing. I never imagined it would be around for more than a year and a half. I can remember a very deliberate thing. Well, yeah, I'll do this as a little bit of a lark. What we called the World Wide Web back then. It's very new. So web pages were, you know,
00:50:02
Speaker
There were only like a couple thousand web pages out there, not 400 trillion web pages. So I thought, well, I'm going to see if I can teach myself how to make a website and why don't I make this magazine and play with that for a year and learn something about how websites work. That was the idea of starting the magazine as clueless as I was.
00:50:27
Speaker
The idea of brevity and 750 words was because I was reading a lot of flash fiction. There are a number of flash fiction anthologies that came out in the 1980s and 1990s. And this was the later 1990s that I started brevity. And I was inspired by all the energy behind flash fiction, 1000 word stories or 500 word stories or 750 word stories. So I thought, well,
00:50:55
Speaker
Maybe we could do this with nonfiction, too, or that would work. And doesn't it make sense for an online journal to have short pieces because nobody's going to want to read a 16 page story on a computer screen? So those ideas kind of came together imperfectly. I certainly didn't have a master plan. I certainly didn't see into the future that it would become a magazine that people talked about and had so many readers, international, an international audience.
00:51:23
Speaker
and then there are all the good things that have happened since. Yeah, the boundary of it is part of its appeal. Probably a lot of us have 1,000, 1,500-word, 2,000-word essays just in the drawer kicking around. And it's like, well, that 750 words is like some of the best editor you can have. It's like, how can I squeeze out this stuff and fit it into that form without losing
00:51:51
Speaker
without feeling like we're missing something. It's often like the best friend you can have is to say, well, you have no choice but to cut this by 50 or 60%. And it's a great tool and a great ally to have that kind of constriction. And when you go back to write your 3,000-word essay, you go back to write your full-length book, what you learned about your own writing and struggling to cut your things down to 750 words, I'm repeating what you said.
00:52:22
Speaker
You learn a lot about your own writing in the process of editing it down to such a small, small space. You asked very early on about self-editing. That's certainly a good way to learn. Self-editing is to take a piece and say, I'm going to cut out every word that doesn't need to be here. And I'm going to figure out a way to express an idea once and then move on. Because in flash work and very short like poetry,
00:52:51
Speaker
This is true of poetry too, but in very short prose, every sentence has to not just deliver a message, but every sentence has to be doing two or three things at once. It's building character. It's creating the rhythm of the narrative. It's giving a little bit of mood or setting. It's beginning to construct the overall metaphor of the piece. You look at really good flash prose, and each sentence is constructed to do multiple things.
00:53:21
Speaker
They all linked together and then, you know, poof like magic. No, it's not magic. It's a lot a lot a lot of hard work. Poof like magic. It all falls together and seems like an inevitably perfect 700 word story.
Motivation Behind 'The Story Cure'
00:53:36
Speaker
And with the story cure, what itch was that scratching? That you were like, all right, I want to package this as a way to be the book doctor and diagnose a lot of these problems and pros to ultimately make someone a better novelist or memoirist. So where were you and why did, like I said, what was the itch that this book was scratching for you? I'm a college professor. I teach
00:54:04
Speaker
and have for many years taught both fiction and nonfiction writing to college kids. And I've written a craft book or two that's kind of aimed at that audience, like here's what a scene is, here's what an image is, here's what a metaphor is, these sort of things. But I also, over the summer, more and more, I've been lucky enough to get invited. I teach at the Kenyan Review Summer Writers Workshop. It's a week-long workshop every summer, and the students
00:54:33
Speaker
tend to be in their 30s, 40s, 50s. They're accomplished people, not college kids, but they want to be writers. They have projects they're working on. Kenyans is one of them. I've done it in different places up in Vermont. I've done it down in Georgia, different summer conferences. And then audiences are very different. They're not naive. They probably took creative writing classes in college, though now they're
00:55:03
Speaker
you know, scientists or lawyers or doctors or small business people or, you know, whatever they're doing in their lives. They know the basics, but they don't quite know how to sustain those basics for a longer project. So these people will come to me with three chapters of their memoir and like, I don't know how to get to chapter four, or they'll come to me with a completely written first draft of their memoir or novel and say, you know,
00:55:34
Speaker
I know some stuff is working here and I know some stuff isn't working here and I showed it to a few agents and they went, what do I do now? So I kind of took the years of the many years, many summers of teaching in these various workshops where people were in the middle of book projects, but didn't quite know how to get from where they were to the next, the next major step of the process.
00:56:02
Speaker
And I thought, well, I'll collect all of that. So for a different audience. And that's kind of the audience for this book, I hope, is people who understand. They're readers. They understand what the basics of a story are. They may have taken some writing workshops two years ago or 22 years ago. So they kind of know what dialogue is. And they know all the basics that we teach at a sophomore level, creative writing class. But they don't know how to write a book.
00:56:33
Speaker
They don't know how to tackle a project that's going to excite them and break their heart again and again and again, you know, over the course of two years. And I thought, well, I'm going to try to get that information that I've been sharing in the classroom and sharing one on one, working with people, trying to get that into a book form and see where that leads, which is kind of what most of my projects are. I'm going to try to do this and see where it leads. I'm not
00:57:02
Speaker
not I know exactly what I'm doing. Yeah, what I'm doing. Sometimes after I pretend that I knew exactly what I was doing, but
00:57:10
Speaker
If you were in my office hearing me mutter to myself as I write, you'd understand quickly. I don't know exactly what I'm doing most of the time. I think the book has so much value for the novice looking to start or someone who's more seasoned who just needs to get across the goal line. And I noticed that a lot of the tabs I put in here, the several dozen, it's like, oh yeah, I know I can apply that to this thing I've got in the drawer.
00:57:37
Speaker
and like this might get it over the goal line and then so it's a it's it's got everything for no matter how long you've been doing it or how or how little you've been doing it so it's a it's just like a great little great handbook to keep on your shelf and the pick out oh yeah that's how to diagnose this
00:57:54
Speaker
this little malady in the piece. If you weren't three time zones away from me right now, I'd come over and give you a hug. It's a very nice praise. Well, fantastic. Well, virtual hugs from the West Coast. But, Dinty, I'll let you get out of here. Thank you so much for carving out an hour of your morning. This was a lot of fun for me, and people are going to get a lot out of this, I think. Thank you, Brendan. Yeah, you're very welcome. Take care. Okay. All right. So long. Bye-bye.